Life & Wisdom Quote by Theodore Sturgeon

There is a stubborn, almost defiant plainness to Sturgeon saying fiction is "what I do with my life". No romance of the muse, no priestly talk about Art with a capital A. Just work, chosen and repeated until it becomes identity. Coming from a mid-century science fiction writer who spent years fighting the genre's reputation as disposable pulp, the line reads like a quiet refusal to apologize for what he loved. He isn't asking permission to take fiction seriously; he's announcing that the division between "serious" literature and genre is, for him, irrelevant.

The repetition matters. "It's what I do, it's what I do" is less emphasis than insistence, like someone answering a question they've been asked too many times: Why this? Why not something more respectable? Sturgeon compresses a whole career of being underestimated into a simple cadence that doesn't negotiate. Fiction isn't a pastime or even a vocation; it's the organizing principle of his days, the tool he uses to make sense of people.

The subtext is also protective. By framing fiction as a life practice, Sturgeon sidesteps the fickle measurements of success - sales, awards, critical approval. If fiction is the way you live, it can't be "failed" in the usual sense; it can only be continued or abandoned. For a writer whose best work smuggled tenderness and moral complexity into speculative premises, that stance feels intentional: the stories are not an escape hatch from reality, they're his method for facing it.